Boris Johnson, UK's Answer To Trump, Offers A Masterclass In How To Use The Dead Cat Strategy Combined With A Google Bomb

from the sheer-genius-or-dumb-luck? dept

Boris Johnson -- full name Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson -- was born in New York to English parents, studied at Eton and Oxford, became Mayor of London, and now stands a good chance of becoming the UK's next prime minister. That's not because of any outstanding ability, but largely because he belongs to the country's ruling class and assumes the position is his by right, as do many of his supporters. However, this smooth if completely unearned rise to the top of the UK's political system was threatened recently by an unexpected event. Police were called in the early hours to the London home of Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, after neighbors heard "a loud altercation involving screaming, shouting and banging":

The argument could be heard outside the property where the potential future prime minister is living with Symonds, a former Conservative party head of press.

A neighbour told the Guardian they heard a woman screaming followed by "slamming and banging". At one point Symonds could be heard telling Johnson to "get off me" and "get out of my flat".

Despite repeated questions by interviewers, Johnson refused to comment on the incident, which naturally provoked yet more interest. Johnson's chances of becoming prime minister seemed to be dropping by the hour. And then came an interview with talkRADIO, in which Johnson was asked: "What do you do to relax?" He replied:

I like to paint. Or I make things. I have a thing where I make models of buses. What I make is, I get old, I don't know, wooden crates, and I paint them. It's a box that's been used to contain two wine bottles, right, and it will have a dividing thing. And I turn it into a bus.

So I put passengers -- I paint the passengers enjoying themselves on a wonderful bus -- low carbon, of the kind that we brought to the streets of London, reducing CO2, reducing nitrous oxide, reducing pollution.

As the Guardian reported, this surreal answer blew people's minds, and a variety of reasons were offered for this bizarre response. But Adam Bienkov, UK Political Editor of BusinessInsider, had the best explanation. He reminded people of something that Johnson had written in 2013:

Let us suppose you are losing an argument. The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as "throwing a dead cat on the table, mate".

That is because there is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table -- and I don't mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout "Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!"; in other words they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

Throwing a dead cat on the dining room table -- talking about making models of buses -- worked for Johnson. Everyone in the UK press and beyond started talking about the model buses, and the story about the police being called to Johnson's home was forgotten. That's impressive enough, but it's possible that strange moment in the interview may have achieved even more.

One of Boris Johnson's claims to fame/infamy arose during the deeply-divisive 2016 Brexit referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU. Johnson supported Brexit, and he was photographed in front of the campaign's big red bus that bore the slogan: "We send the EU £350m a week: let’s fund our NHS [National Health Service] instead". It was a bogus statement: the true amount sent to the EU is closer to £160 million pounds a week. Johnson's willingness to endorse that misleading figure is another threat to his claim to be a fit person to become the UK's new prime minister.

A day after the dead cat was thrown on the table, twitter user @MrKennyCampbell realized that Johnson's incoherent rambling about model buses was also a Google bomb. Previously, searches for "boris bus" on Google threw up that lie about how much the UK sent to the EU, and Johnson's tacit agreement with it. Now the same search shows stories about Johnson's passion for making model buses. References to the big red Brexit bus and its slogan have been pushed off the top Google hits, effectively consigning the story about Johnson to relative digital oblivion.

This is such a brilliant example of political search engine optimization that it's hard to believe someone as buffoonish as Johnson would be capable of pulling it off intentionally. Nonetheless, whether it was fiendishly clever planning, or an unbelievably lucky improvisation, there's no denying the episode stands as an object lesson in how to combine the dead cat strategy with a Google bomb to great effect.

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Filed Under: boris johnson, brexit, buses, dead cat, google bomb, nhs, uk

Could You Google Bomb Google Flu?

from the would-you-want-to? dept

Google got a lot of attention recently for the launch of Google Flu Trends, which looks at aggregate data on searches related to the flu, to see if it can act as something of an early warning system for where there are flu problems. It's an interesting use of the data, and it will be worth watching what else can be done with this sort of data over time. However, Ed Felten raises an interesting question: can Google Flu Trends be manipulated? The idea is that, right now, it may be accurate, but the very fact that people know Google is tracking this information, could create incentives to game that info -- in the same way people have tried gaming Google in other ways for years, using tricks such as Google bombing. While you might not think there would be that many reasons to manipulate Google Flu Trends, there could be reasons to do so. Google is being somewhat secretive of how Flu Trends is set up, so perhaps that makes it more difficult to manipulate, but it does point to an interesting issue in using data in this manner. As soon as you've set up a system to measure the data, and made that public, is the data still reliable?

Filed Under: google bomb, google flu
Companies: google

Arrested For Googlebombing (And Insulting The President Of Poland)

from the thin-skinned-politicians dept

The concept of Googlebombing has been around for quite some time. Basically, you get a bunch of folks to link to a certain site using a specific word or phrase and hope that Google picks it up and the site you link to reaches the top of the list. Wikipedia has a lot of good info on the history of Googlebombing. It's especially popular in the political arena, particularly in trying to insult a politician one side doesn't like by associating that person with a derogatory word or phrase. During the last Presidential election, both major candidates had this done to them. The real damage of a Googlebomb is quite miniscule. Often, the phrases being used are somewhat rare -- which is what allows the Googlebomb to work in the first place (otherwise, there's a lot more competition to get it up the list). Second, it's unlikely to impact anyone's political views to do a search on an insulting phrase and see a link to a political candidate. Realistically, all that happens with most Googlebombs is that the group that set it up sends it around to a bunch of supporters, who Google the phrase and laugh at a politician they never liked in the first place. At best, all it does is stir up the opposition to get angry at Google and then to do a Googlebomb of their own. All in all, it's basically a harmless waste of time (and more recently, Google has become much more effective in preventing Googlebombs from working).

However, as pointless and harmless as they are, apparently not everyone is comfortable with being on the receiving end of a Googlebomb. A programmer in Poland trying to practice his programming skills, created a simple piece of software that would apparently automate the process of creating a Googlebomb (it's not entirely clear how). He did so with a test using Poland's president and a derogatory search word. Apparently, his software worked... but Polish officials were not amused, arresting the guy for insulting the president. It wasn't hard to track the guy down, as he didn't make any real effort to hide himself. What's really bizarre, though, is that this guy is now facing three years in prison for a simple little hack that probably had no impact on what anyone thought of Poland's president. Of course, we probably should note that, in arresting this guy for such a silly online prank, Poland has called a lot more attention to this little stunt than if it had just ignored it and let it run its course.

Filed Under: google bomb, poland